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Sir Anthony (Derrick) Parsons

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SIR ANTHONY (DERRICK) PARSONS Interview Index. 2. Early life to 1954. Army. Studying Arabic and Turkish at Oxford. Entering FO. 3-4. Turkey and Jordan, 1955-60. Comments on local politics. (See also 17). 4-5. Press work in Cairo. Diplomatic relations with Nasser. 5-6. Refuses to head Middle East section of Information Research Department. 6-7. American Department. Cuban Missile crisis (calm reaction of Home). 7-10. Sudan. Local politics. Royal visit. 10-12. Bahrain, 1965-9. Local politics. 1967 war. British 'East of Suez' withdrawal. 13. Comments on Michael Stewart as Foreign Secretary. 13-14. United Nations 1969-71. 14. Assistant Under-Secretary, 1971-4. 14-18. Iran, 1971-9. The Shah. The Economy. Rising discontent. US colleagues. 18. Comments on Baghdad Pact meeting and Iraqi unrest in 1958. 18-19. Deputy Under-Secretary. 19-25. Ambassador to UN: Zimbabwe settlement (19-21); Namibia (22); Falklands War (22- 25). 25-28. Working with Thatcher, 1982-3. Personal relationship. Role in Downing Street. 28-29. Changes in the diplomatic service during his career. 1 British Diplomatic Oral History Project Jane Barder interviewing Sir Anthony Parsons on 22nd March 1996 at home in Devon. JB: Sir Anthony retired from the Diplomatic Service in 1982 as Permanent Representative at the United Nations in New York. Post retirement he worked as a Special Adviser on Foreign Affairs to the Prime Minister, Mrs. Thatcher, from 1982 to 1983. He was appointed LVO in 1965, CMG in 1969, KCMG in 1975, GCMG in 1982. He was born in 1922; he was educated at Kings School, Canterbury and Balliol College, Oxford; and then I think you were in the Army when you went to Oxford - were you not? AP: I was meant to go up to Oxford probably in 1940 when I was 18, but I went into the Army instead, like millions of the rest of us did, and at the end of the War I was seconded to the Palestine Government for three years and left in that disastrous scuttle we had from Palestine in 1948. I found myself still stuck with a Commission in the Army; I couldn't get out. Then I discovered to my great joy that the Army were prepared to release me from military duty to go back to Oxford, because my education there had been interrupted for a couple of years, and take a degree. I wanted to do English literature, but when I suggested this to the local General, who was interviewing me, he exploded and said that he wasn't going to let me go to Oxford and leave my military duties in order to learn poetry; and was there anything I could do that would be useful to the Army? So I said I knew Arabic, because I had been working in Arabic for the previous three years; so he said: very well, if you study Arabic then I'll let you go to Oxford if you can get yourself a place in the Oriental Studies School there, which I did. So I went to Balliol, the college which I would have gone to anyway if it hadn't been for the War, and I read Oriental Studies with Arabic and Turkish being my two languages. I was then stuck with another two or three years in the Army to work off the release from military duties that I had had. So after some argument about whether I should go back to Regimental duties I signed a piece of paper saying I forfeited all promotion beyond the rank of Major provided that I was permanently seconded to intelligence duties. So I went to the Embassy in Baghdad as Assistant Military Attaché, where I played out my time and had an extremely interesting job there; and then I joined the Diplomatic Service from there, having learnt all about it, as an over-age entry. JB: That was in 1954. 2 AP: Yes, that was in 1954. JB: Then you just spent a year in the Office and then went back to use your Turkish. AP: Yes, I spent a year in the Office and then one day I met the Head of Personnel in the corridor and he said: it’s about time we sent you somewhere in Europe; and I thought: that's fine; they will send me to Paris or Rome or somewhere like that and before I knew where I was I was in Ankara, obviously because of my Turkish. I was for four years the principal Turkish speaker in the Chancery of the Embassy in Ankara and taking pretty well all the political papers and also having special responsibility for studying the Turkish domestic situation. It was a fascinating time to be in Turkey because the country was in a kind of reverse transition - Ata Türk had secularised it, twenty years before; he had changed the Turkish language from the Arabic script to the Latin, changed the dress from traditional dress and so on and had made a determined resolution to transform Turkey into a western European Country; but by the time I was there Ata Türk's party had been thrown out of power and the Democratic Party, which was in power, was very much based in voting terms on the countryside and small provincial towns, which were, of course, still very traditional in their outlook. So you had a situation where in the big cities like Ankara and Istanbul and also in the Armed Forces you had the firm belief in Ata Türk's revolution and secularisation but the Government was putting a lot of money into building new mosques and that kind of thing; and so traditional Islam was beginning to return in the countryside and in the small towns and villages; you had this dichotomy between an European country, because of the revolution, and the re-emergence of a traditional Islamic country in part of the population. It was also, of course, in the period of four years during which the whole of the Middle East was more or less aflame. We had Nasserism sweeping the area, putting monarchies and pro-Western regimes at risk all the way from Egypt to the Persian Gulf. You had this clash between Iraq on the one hand and Egypt for pre-eminence in the Middle East. We had the Suez aberration which affected Turkey a great deal. Syria nearly went Communist. The Iraqi monarchy was brought down in a bloody revolution in 1958. British troops landed in Jordan and American troops landed in the Lebanon. And all through this period the main preoccupation in the Embassy was the Cyprus problem. These were our last years in Cyprus and we were trying to decolonize the country without creating either major inter-communal strife or even worse an actual inter-state war between Greece and Turkey, both members of NATO. We succeeded in the latter, but not in the former. 3 JB: That was a four year posting; and then you went to Jordan? AP: Then I went to Jordan. By 1959 when I was to leave Turkey (in any case I had been there too long for a First Secretary), Syria and Egypt were united in the UAR and the idea was that I would go and open up a Consulate General in Damascus subordinate to Cairo; but the resumption of diplomatic relations with Egypt /Syria kept on drifting into the distance - they had broken with us after Suez, of course - and so I was sent to Jordan, really in order to wait until Damascus opened up. That didn't happen; the whole thing dragged and so I went off to Cairo for 18 months or so. JB: What as? Still First Secretary? AP: Again I was kind of Oriental Secretary in Cairo - technically, I think, I was called the Press Attaché - but my main job again was to study the Egyptian internal political situation through the medium of the Press; because Egypt in those days was very very strictly controlled, a police state, and it was rather like being in a Communist country. You had to get your information through interpretation of what was coming out in the public media. That was one of my principal jobs, God help me. When I got to the office in the morning my first duty was to read all the Arabic newspapers and periodicals, not from cover to cover obviously, not the Art pages and that kind of thing, but all the political pages and the leaders, so I could inform some people of what was going on, not only in domestic terms but also in terms of foreign policy, because Egypt was at the time leading the newly born non-aligned movement between the two blocs - Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah, Tito were the four originators of the non-aligned movement. "Non-aligned" to us in Cairo in those days seemed to be a process of giving the Soviet Union the benefit of every doubt and never giving the West benefit of any doubt! But still it was presented as non-alignment between the two blocs and there was some truth in that. And that was an exciting time because we were trying to resume full diplomatic relations, which we only got just before I left in the late summer of 1961. JB: So what did you have until then - a Chargé or a British Interests Mission? AP: We started out as a Trade Mission and then we became a Diplomatic Mission and then eventually in the spring of '61, I suppose it must have been, we got full diplomatic relations back.
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